Chalnoth, sorry was unaware of your physics background. No insult was intended it is just that many do not know what the LCH is I was trying to illucitate others on the experiments.
Well, I didn't take it as an insult. Just to let you know the state of affairs.
Its not nonsense. While I doubt we will come away from LHC with a warp drive or anything like it we may discover new understandings of physics which will allow for us to develop those technologies over time.
The thing is, new discoveries don't work this way. They firm up knowledge in areas where we don't yet have information. They don't entirely overturn old discoveries. For an example, take Newtonian Mechanics and Special Relativity.
Due to Special Relativity, we know that Newtonian Mechanics is very wrong when you go about comparing objects moving at very high relative velocities. But does this mean that we don't teach students about Newtonian Mechanics? Certainly not! There is a well-understood range of application where Newtonian Mechanics is known to be highly accurate. There just isn't any reason to make use of special relativity most of the time. So we teach students the much easier, and often much more useful, Newtonian Mechanics first.
But it's worth being aware of the limits of where our experiments have reached so far. With Newtonian Mechanics, it's really easy: we know where it breaks down because we know the more accurate theories that apply when you get to small distances, low temperatures, extremely high temperatures, high velocities, or strong gravitational fields.
With our current understanding of gravity and quantum theory, we don't yet know the theories that apply beyond where our experiments have gone, but we do know that these theories are accurate up to as far as these experiments have probed. For quantum theory, we know it is accurate up to energies of a few hundred GeV, which for macroscopic matter would represent temperatures or velocities so vastly beyond what we are ever capable of producing that we just won't realistically be able to access those energies in a macroscopic way. For gravity, we know that the current theory is accurate on length scales as small as a fraction of a millimeter, and out to distances as large as many millions of light years. Once again, there's just no wiggle room available for the movement of large, macroscopic objects.
So yes, because of where experiments to date have taken us, we can say with a high degree of confidence that things like warp drive and teleportation are just not ever going to work.
Now, an experiment like the LHC is going to be exceedingly interesting for people like myself that want to know where the next stage in high-energy physics will take us (mind you, not interested enough to work in that field...I'm in cosmology). But we can say with an extremely high degree of confidence that it's not going to lead to Star Trek.
Another point would be that LHC may allow scientist to discover a new dimension. This would greatly add to our understanding of physics.
Indeed. But most people seem to misunderstand what is meant by dimension here.
A dimension is just a direction of motion. In the world in which we live, we experience three dimensions: up/down, left/right, and forward/back. If there exists another dimension, then this means that there is another direction out there, one that we cannot move in and so have no word for, but which nevertheless exists. There could, in fact, be many such extra dimensions: string theory predicts that there are a total of 10 space and time dimensions.
As for bending space/time requiring such massive amounts of energy as to render it unrealistic, I would suggest that you are thinking to much inside the box. I think we will develop exotic matter and the technology to utilize it to travel to the far galaxies. The experiments at LHC could at least be the start on that path.
Any new matter we find at the LHC is highly, highly unlikely to be both stable and interacting. And even if we could find such matter, the energy requirements don't just go away.
